Cite as: 528 U. S. 167 (2000)
Syllabus
fenders of Wildlife, 504 U. S. 555, 560-561. An association has standing to bring suit on behalf of its members when its members would have standing to sue in their own right, the interests at stake are germane to the organization's purpose, and neither the claim asserted nor the relief requested requires individual members' participation in the lawsuit. Hunt v. Washington State Apple Advertising Comm'n, 432 U. S. 333, 343. The relevant showing for Article III standing is not injury to the environment but injury to the plaintiff. To insist on the former rather than the latter is to raise the standing hurdle higher than the necessary showing for success on the merits in a citizen's NPDES permit enforcement suit. Here, injury in fact was adequately documented by the affidavits and testimony of FOE members asserting that Laid-law's pollutant discharges, and the affiants' reasonable concerns about the effects of those discharges, directly affected those affiants' recreational, aesthetic, and economic interests. See, e. g., Sierra Club v. Morton, 405 U. S. 727, 735. These submissions present dispositively more than the mere "general averments" and "conclusory allegations" found inadequate in Lujan v. National Wildlife Federation, 497 U. S. 871, 888, or the " 'some day' intentions" to visit endangered species halfway around the world held insufficient in Defenders of Wildlife. 504 U. S., at 564. Pp. 180-185. (c) Laidlaw argues that FOE lacked standing to seek civil penalties payable to the Government, because such penalties offer no redress to citizen plaintiffs. For a plaintiff who is injured or threatened with injury due to illegal conduct ongoing at the time of suit, a sanction that effectively abates that conduct and prevents its recurrence provides a form of redress. Civil penalties can fit that description. Insofar as they encourage defendants to discontinue current violations and deter future ones, they afford redress to citizen plaintiffs injured or threatened with injury as a result of ongoing unlawful conduct. The Court need not explore the outer limits of the principle that civil penalties provide sufficient deterrence to support redressability, because the civil penalties sought here carried a deterrent effect that made it likely, as opposed to merely speculative, that the penalties would redress FOE's injuries—as the District Court reasonably found when it assessed a penalty of $405,800. Steel Co. is not to the contrary. That case held that private plaintiffs may not sue to assess penalties for wholly past violations, 523 U. S., at 106-107, but did not address standing to seek penalties for violations ongoing at the time of the complaint that could continue into the future if undeterred, see id., at 108. Pp. 185-188.
(d) FOE's civil penalties claim did not automatically become moot once the company came into substantial compliance with its permit. A defendant's voluntary cessation of a challenged practice ordinarily does
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